After six years, sculptor Stanislav Kolíbal returns to the Ostrava gallery with a major retrospective exhibition.

While Kolíbal’s previous exhibition at the House of Art presented an exceptional collection of drawings from the artist’s early Ostrava period as well as an overview of his illustrative work, this time he will fill the entire exhibition space with a comprehensive survey of his work from the mid-1950s to the present. The exhibition is titled Sculpture and Drawings, highlighting Kolíbal’s main artistic activities, but this title hardly captures the full scope and meaning of the artist’s extraordinary innovation in working with space and drawing. The Ostrava exhibition is a tribute to this exceptional artist, a native of nearby Orlová, who lived in Ostrava between 1938 and 1945. It is a return to his homeland and to Ostrava, where he is an honorary citizen, and also a commemoration of Kolíbal’s ninetieth birthday, which the artist will celebrate during the exhibition. Every Kolíbal exhibition is a special event in its own right. The artist designs them specifically for the given space, which is also true here at the House of Art. Alongside key works, the exhibition will present lesser-known or rarely exhibited pieces. The exhibition is accompanied by an authorial catalogue summarizing his work, completing a trilogy that includes Kolíbal’s two previous Ostrava catalogues.

Stanislav Kolíbal was born on December 11, 1925, in Orlová, in the Těšín region. Even during his high school studies, he developed a broad interest in art that led to studies in graphic arts at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague (1945–1950) and scenography at the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (1951–1954). From the 1950s, he systematically devoted himself to sculpture. A crucial turning point in Kolíbal’s artistic thinking came in the late 1950s, after becoming acquainted with the works of artists such as Alexander Calder and Isamu Noguchi. Since then, Kolíbal has uniquely combined the formal aspects of sculpture and spatial work with the semantic aspects of the work. He employs geometric and abstracting forms and has gradually addressed current issues such as minimalism, installation, Arte Povera, construction and deconstruction, and most recently neomodernism, all in his own distinctive manner. Initially fascinated by instability and volatility, later he thematized his works with questions of time, permanence, and decay.

From the second half of the 1960s, Kolíbal’s work was included in international exhibitions of world art such as Sculpture from Twenty Nations at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1967) and Between Man and Matter in Tokyo (1970). Since the 1960s, he has exhibited solo in Western Europe and had five solo exhibitions in New York during the 1970s and 1980s.

A certain transformation in Kolíbal’s work occurred after his stay in West Berlin in 1988, where he was granted a prestigious scholarship by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). In contact with the everyday reality of the free world, Kolíbal began exploring questions of harmony and discord through his work. He gravitated more distinctly towards the language of geometry, which serves him as a means of expressing fundamental principles of our existence. During this period, he also had a significant, though relatively brief, teaching position at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague from 1990 to 1993. An important working stay also took place in Alexander Calder’s studio in Saché on the Loire in 1992. Kolíbal’s comprehensive retrospective at the National Gallery in Prague took place in 1997, and in 2000, he presented the largest collection of his Constructions—wooden or iron architectural-spatial objects, drawings translated into the third dimension—at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. His last two major exhibitions were held in Prague: at the Riding Hall of Prague Castle (2012–13) and this year at the Trade Fair Palace.

Kolíbal’s recent work is based on layered drawing thinking and emotional intelligence, where geometric forms engage in their own semantic play of agreements and disagreements aimed at finding order and harmony. Kolíbal uses geometry and abstraction to create a parallel to our reality. His focus on the fundamental formal language and use of “neutral” white or black color in his reliefs and spatial objects expresses the artist’s belief that the simplest path is the best in art. It also reflects his conviction that an artist’s role is to grasp and express being — that special connection of perfection with our imperfection.

Martin Dostál

Translated with the help of GPT chat.

Exhibition Concept: Stanislav Kolíbal
Curator:  Martin Dostál
Production: Jan Kudrna
Architectural design : Pavel Kolíbal
Graphic design: Marek Jodas
Promotion: Kateřina Mertha, Jana Šrubařová